Field of Technology
This disclosure relates to audio analysis, and more specifically to provision of a real-time speech behavior visualization and gamification tool that promotes better interpersonal skills and decision-making in conversations, supports situational awareness for call center teams, enables better coaching of call center staff by supervisors, and enables higher quality interactions with customers.
Background
R&D focused on customer connections to and from the call center has been around for some time, and supervisors and managers will review call length and call frequency data from time-to-time to understand performance. Thanks to speech-to-text technologies, they may also search recordings of conversations for key words. However, so far the art has not found effective ways to support active feedback, supervision and review of conversations based on behavior, especially in real time and across distributed teams. In this context, the term behavior refers to how people speak, and specifically the tonal, pacing, mirroring and turn-taking measurements that describe how people come across to each other independently of the words that they use.
Providing an excellent customer experience in call centers has increasingly become strategic for enterprise, and there is an increasing understanding that how an agent comes across can affect conversation outcomes. The status quo in call center agent feedback and supervision is for supervisors to randomly select an agent-member conversation to listen to and provide commentary. Agents have few tools that readily support self-study and self-improvement. Supervisors have no way to track multiple agents, and few methods for intelligently selecting which conversation to listen in on. Many supervisors only review a single conversation a month for each of the agents in their team and thus have little information about how their agents are sounding while they are speaking with customers. This situation becomes even more challenging because call center teams are increasing dispersed, with many agents now working from home thus reducing a supervisor's ability to listen for tone and behavior by walking around an office space. At the same time, call center teams can also suffer from significant turnover, resulting in a high need for training.